Valued Experience

Valued Experience
By Arthur Cooper
(c) Copyright 2003

Until two or three years ago a whole generation of manager had grown up which had never had to face contraction in the workplace. Over the previous twenty years businesses had grown and flourished almost in spite of themselves. The world was expanding its trade and businesses expanded with it. The high tech sector was only the most extreme example of a general situation.

Throughout this period managers only had to manage expansion, not contraction. Consequently when suddenly faced, as they are now, with a contracting market and much tougher competition for a slice of the shrinking cake they are finding themselves without the experience necessary to cope. This is compounded by the fact that often those members of staff who have been made redundant or encouraged to leave as they entered their fifties are the very same people who were old enough to have seen the last downturn and who had experience of how to deal with it.

These are often the same people who when still at work were labelled 'dinasaurs' or unduly cynical when faced with the fresh faced enthusiasm of their younger colleagues. But when they warned that something would not work, that it had been tried before and had failed, perhaps they were right after all. Perhaps it was not resistance to change that they were exhibiting, but rather the wisdom of experience. Perhaps they were not cynics after all, but realists. They could now perhaps say 'I told you so' with some justification, but sadly they are often not around any more to be able to do so.

And so the new generation continues to flounder. Whilst for many companies it is already too late to do anything, those who do still have time, who do still have a few of the old heads still left, would be well advised to start to listen to some of the comments, to seek them out and ask their advice, to include them in the discussions of strategy and tactics. They should make use of their experience before it is too late.

It is a truism that life in general is too short to learn from our own mistakes. We should make use of others' experience and learn from their mistakes. So it is for a company. The sum of experience within a company is an asset which must guarded and looked after and drawn on as needed. It absolutely must not be thrown away before it has been preserved, recorded, and passed on to the next business generation.

So value your older employees and accept that they still have something to offer. Don't let them just drift off into retirement or redundancy. Use them to train the new generation before they go. Get them to give their comments on the way the company is run. You may not always like what you hear, but you may learn something of real value.